RHI voiceover

Crystal Annis, a first-year PA student, gives advice to future AHEC scholars. She emphasizes the importance of embracing the RHI process and the opportunities it offers to meet various healthcare professionals, community members, and students. She highlights the value of shadowing different individuals and learning from their unique approaches to care. Crystal shares her experience volunteering at a community event in Western Maine, where AHEC members connected with organizations providing resources to the community. She mentions programs offering transportation assistance, adult education, and vaccinations. Crystal found the rural communities in Maine to be friendly and this experience has fueled her passion for pursuing rural medicine. Hi everybody, this is Crystal Annis, a first year PA student. For our words of advice, the biggest piece of advice to future AHEC scholars that I have is when embarking on your RHI is to lean into the process. You're going to meet so many people on the submersion from local health care professionals to members of the community and even students at the university that you didn't even know existed. For me, it was super interesting to get to chat with the common dental students that were on our RHI because you get to learn so much about their programs and what drives them to want to pursue health care and join AHEC. For the shadowing portion, I'm always surprised after years of shadowing how much more you can learn from working with a different person. Watching the different approaches to care and style of implementing it always blows me away. And having the opportunity to talk to all of the members of the health care team can provide you with a perspective on medicine that you never even considered. On the Western Maine RHI, we were fortunate to have the opportunity to volunteer at a community event where local organizations that provide resources to community members in the Farmington area were present to speak to the public about what they have to offer. AHEC members were able to meet many of these people working for the organizations to discuss their goals for supporting the community and the resources that they have to offer. We spoke to a program that provides rides to members of the community who need help getting to appointments, which can be a huge problem in rural Maine. An adult education program providing affordable opportunities for people to further their education and an organization that was providing flu and COVID vaccinations to many of the community members and AHEC members got to participate in this as well. I can only speak from experience, but I found that rural communities in Maine have some of the friendliest people and the people in Western Maine were definitely no exception. This experience has only made me more excited about pursuing rural medicine in the future and it's all because I leaned into this opportunity.